Terra Nova

Anda / Grokster / New Paper

Three quick notes on Anda's Game, the Grokster ruling, and my GLS paper on Norrathian law, respectively.

(This post has nothing to do with the Kalmar Nyckle, btw -- just couldn't think of a good picture to use...)

Sony Station Exchange Goes Live

Sony has launched its in-house RMT system (discussed here.) The first exchange-enabled server is called 'The Bazaar'. Currency and characters are already for sale. To get a feel for the interface, see below.

In A Gama Da DiGRA

Went quiet, went stateside, went digra, went moonlighting.

Women Speak

Raya spent four months in 2004 interviewing 110 women, primarily EQ players, about their experiences in mogs. It's a nine-part series, should be interesting. Figuring out what exactly is 'pink' about online gaming - maybe nothing - is not easy.  Are most women online gamers involved in digital recreations of face-to-face gaming (spades, euchre, literati)? What are the implications?

Thanks Oloh, aka Don Shelkey of Silky Venom, for the tip.

Go Cabby (Past) Go!

Kotaku is reporting of Hasbro's "Real World Online Monopoly Live" promotion.  Yet another variant of the blending of the virtual with the physical worlds...

Emergence Emerges Some More

I've got a lot of thoughts sparked by DiGRA coming, including a long meditation on the dreaded ludology-narratology thing, but first I wanted to mention an interesting sub-theme I noticed weaving its way through the conference: emergence, complex systems, non-human agency, network theory and related topics. Nicholas Glean dealt centrally with these issues. I understand  Seth Giddings as also being engaged on these topics, though I missed his paper presentation. I caught a number of other mentions or invocations of these concepts. Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern's Facade (their presentation on it was one of the highlights of the meeting for me) also clearly is a case of emergence, even if they don't explicitly see it as such.

My own paper dealt with the same issues. A draft is available at my blog. I've fiddled with it some since then.

One thing that I think is important about the general suite of concepts under this heading is that they can be painfully vague or misleading in the wrong hands, or just marketing hype. But in the context of games, at the very least, emergence is a technique for creating the psychologically convincing simulation of life or intentionality. There is clearly a deep mental algorithim that human beings use to sort life and non-life that agent-based emergent systems do a pretty good job of tapping into.

I think there's even more to the concept that's relevant to games, and especially persistent virtual world games. But I'll leave that for  the full paper. I do think it's an important concept  for game scholars to consider, and consider well.

GLS Conference

Several Terra Novans (Ted, TL, Cory, Dmitri, and I) have descended on Madison, Wisconsin for the Games, Learning, and Society conference organized by Constance and guided by the James Gee mafia of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.  As the title suggests, the focus is mostly on games in education. Below are notes from the first panel I went to, featuring Henry Jenkins and James Gee. (Updated 6/24 -- added notes from PARC PlayOn guys. Added Social Effects / Addiction.)

Developments in the MOG Market

Frequent poster and Online Alchemy CEO Mike Sellers sends this report on recent developments in the multiplayer online game (mog) market:

"Last week, Blizzard announced WoW now has over 2 million subscribers.  And this doesn't count China, where they've just opened up.  They report having over 500,000 concurrent users in China during their open beta.
(http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=5696)

On the same day, rumors (later confirmed) abounded that Monolith had sold The Matrix Online to SOE.  Twenty-six people on the team were given offers to go to San Diego, the rest were out of jobs.  The future of Monolith in the wake of this, not to mention the entire market,  appears uncertain. "

Sticky NeoPets

Game Journalism reports (via WSJ Online) that Viacom has paid 160$ million for the Neopets website and 20 million subscribers.   This is significant money, e.g. when compared with many MMORPGs. 

Ce n'est pas un monde virtuel

Although this has been discussed once or twice before, it is clearly time to charge fearlessly into the breach.

Are graphical digital worlds just text worlds with pretty graphics?  After all, people get all excited about sales of virtual items, weddings, stalking, gender bending, and governance, yet all of these behaviors happened in earlier text-based worlds and were probably discussed on MUD-Dev in 1997.  Several of these comments touch on this topic in the context that creativity in Second Life is no different than MOOs,  so I wanted to put a stake in the ground and then duck and cover:

Physically simulated 3D worlds are fundamentally different from text worlds.

Read on for why